F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Beach

F. Scott Fitzgerald—or his wife—is seemingly everywhere lately, especially on Amazon Prime with not one but two television series: Z: The Beginning of Everything and The Last Tycoon. Now he has made the top of the New York Times bestseller list in the pages of John Grisham's Camino Island, a hot summer Kindle beach read. No courtroom drama this time from the author of A Time to Kill (1989) and The Rainmaker (1995): Camino Island successfully resists easy classification as either a caper story, a thriller, a mystery, or a police procedural—although it contains elements of all these subgenres. Unfortunately, the alchemy here will not completely satisfy adherents of any of these thriller variants. As for devotees of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, we are left puzzling over why Grisham chose to make the theft of the original manuscripts of Fitzgerald's five novels from the Princeton library the premise of his latest tale, for they turn out to be little more than the MacGuffin in a Hitchcock film: they are the object everyone pursues, but they serve merely as a plot device with little innate relevance to the theme or significance. In other words, the manuscripts are invoked only for their monetary value on the black book market, not their literary significance.

Not only that, but Grisham has revealed in a recent New York Times inter-view that he considered using Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck manuscripts. "But," as the article notes, "Faulkner wrote too many books to steal. The locations of Steinbeck's and Hemingway's manuscripts are too scattered. Only Fitzgerald had a conveniently portable five-book collection stored in a single place, Princeton's Firestone Library" (Maslin). So it is not as if Camino Island celebrates Fitzgerald as the great American author (or even Grisham's own favorite). This Fitzgerald popular culture triumph is not due to his artistic preeminence but to the vicissitudes of estates and library science.

The novel begins with the Princeton heist, and Grisham presents the unfolding of the plotters' intricate plan crisply and entertainingly. But we rarely return to any of these characters again, for the remainder of the novel is largely concerned with a completely different plot and cast and is almost entirely set in the village of Santa Rosa on Camino Island, off the northeast coast of Florida.

As a novelist himself, Grisham has an ear for dialogue and an eye for believable settings, such as the small-town Florida beach scene here, and this time he moves out of his comfort zone by making a woman his protagonist: Mercer Mann, a young novelist who is recruited by an insurance company's security agency to gather incriminating evidence on the one truly interesting character in the book, Bruce Cable, the owner of the independent bookstore in Santa Rosa who collects first editions and does not care how he obtains them. Unfortunately, there is little suspense after the heist is over. The one plot twist when it comes is hardly surprising, and the denouement is both aesthetically and morally dubious.

Cable, interestingly, truly loves books and admires authors, and his bookstore surprisingly thrives in an Amazon age. He knows what sells, but he also has taste, and when asked he gives advice to the writers in town and the ones who pass through on book tours. This advice is suspiciously similar to the advice Grisham himself gives in a May New York Times interview entitled "John Grisham's Do's and Don'ts for Writing Popular Fiction." In other words, Grisham has given his book thief much of his own literary sensibility, which points to the one truly interesting aspect of the novel, a kind of "meta-discussion" of contemporary fiction—"meta" in that Grisham is apparently concerned with how his own work fits on the commercial-artistic spectrum his writer characters use as a way to assess their own and others' works.

The authors who live year-round in Camino Island socialize regularly and convivially and love to talk...